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Repost: Album Review - Michael Brunnock - The Orchard

[I'm reposting this album review I wrote in January of Michael Brunnock's third album 'The Orchard' because the official Irish release is tomorrow with a launch in Dublin's Odessa Club.]

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The Orchard is Michael Brunnock's second album and is set to be released in February. The Orchard is an album of great depth, strong big themes, amazing vocals and most importantly it is a collection of wonderfully crafted songs.

I've been very fortunate to be in the company of Michael's album since November and it was the soundtrack of my Christmas together with Marc O'Reilly's debut and the Jukebox Gypsy live album. The thirteen songs are immense deep and often personal songs. The themes within the songs concern change, new beginnings, hope, love, companionship, fairytales, circle of life etc. This is a serious album of great and powerful songs that work! It proves to me what a powerful healer or meditative tool a great collection of songs can be.

There's a long list of collaborators on the album. Glen Hansard provides effective backing vocals on the title track and in particular Glen's and Michael's vocals sound amazing on 'Untouchable'. Other contributors include Blues singer Moe Holmes on Sensation, Ari Hest on guitar, piano and backing vocal duties on a number of tracks and Lir's David Hopkins providing piano on many of the tracks. The lead single from the album 'Every Step' is gentle folk song full of positive messages and consists of backing vocals from blog favourite Mark Dignam.

Every song on 'The Orchard' in their own right is meaningful and special. There are three songs that stand out slightly above the rest. These are 'Man Overboard', 'Untouchable' and 'Sensation' but I can write about any of the songs with enthusiasm and praise. It's the melodies and the refraining powerful lyrics that relate to me. On 'Sensation' when Moe Holmes begins singing
"All your love comes on strong, when I need it" it simply gets to me. I feel the lyrics and the songs lingers within me. I love it when great songs do that and most of this album does this!

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It's been in the news that 25 years ago Irish Summers got a bit more interesting with the arrival of Féile festivals. I was lucky enough to be a mid teen attender at Feile 1994 with great memories of dancing to Blur, the dangerous mosh pit of 'House of Pain' the rock and roll swooning of Primal Scream and perfect pop of Bjork.

There are a few funny clips from Feile on Youtube but we'll start with the line-ups!

The poster for the first Féile in 1990 was .....

In 1991 we had:

And in 1992 there was .....

There are currently no posters online for the Feiles of 1993 or the last one in Turles is 1994. Taken from Wikipedia here are a list of bands from each year: